Christopher Atkins claims his drinking cost him the lead role in “Footloose,” which ultimately went to Kevin Bacon.
The “Blue Lagoon” actor looked back at his career during a recent appearance at Fanboy Expo Knoxville in Tennessee, which celebrates pop culture and nostalgia, People magazine reported.
According to the outlet, the 65-year-old actor said filmmakers behind the 1984 classic wanted to meet with him before making their final casting decision, but he wasn’t able to pull it off.
“I was a mess back then,” he told the panel, as quoted by People. “I was partying it up way too much, and they called me in.”
“I said… ‘I can’t go in right now. I’ve been drinking and carrying on,’” Atkins recalled. “And they said, ‘No, they need to see you.’ And I went in, and I just blew that audition… I mean, it wasn’t even an audition — I had the part, but I was so messed up that they said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to pass on this guy.’”
“And I’m almost 40 years sober, so there you go,” Atkins added.
The actor also reflected on his breakout role in “The Blue Lagoon” during the discussion. The former teen heartthrob was just 18 when he was cast in the 1980 movie opposite Brooke Shields.
“I’d never done anything before,” Atkins explained. “Never wanted to be an actor — I only wanted to play baseball. That was my dream.”
“I didn’t know what a camera looked like. I had no idea what a mark was, and I knew nothing. And I had to jump on an airplane and fly all the way to Fiji,” he said.
“I ended up modeling for [the] Ford Modeling Agency in New York City and auditioned for ‘The Blue Lagoon’… And I kept getting called back and called back and called back. And then [after] a couple of months, I didn’t hear from them… And then all of a sudden, I got another callback.”
The “Dallas” alum said his “whole life changed” after the movie’s release.
“We were young, and so you’re constantly getting this notoriety,” Atkins explained. “And the magazines need you to sell their magazines, and you’re hot at that time. And so it does get overwhelming… There are times when you’re doing interviews, and you have a line of people, and you have to say the same thing to each person because they have the same question.”
“But it changes your life, because all of a sudden you’re nothing and then you’re on every single grocery store magazine.”
Back in 2025, Atkins told Fox News Digital he “didn’t know that much” about Shields, then 14, before she joined him on the set of “The Blue Lagoon.”
“I lived on [a] boat off the island [where we were filming]… she hadn’t come yet,” he said at the time. “She had another week or so before she was going to get here. The director had put her picture up over my bed so that I could start falling in love with her before the movie started. That was my introduction to Brooke Shields.”
The movie was controversial for depicting the two young characters in a sexual relationship. Shields and the movie’s crew have long maintained that she used body doubles for nude scenes and that her hair was glued to her body to avoid exposing her chest, People magazine reported.
“The crew was all Australian,” Atkins said. “Back in the day, all the Australian beaches… were topless. It was very natural and freeing for the Australians… And being on a deserted island, there were no tourists, nothing. It was just us on this island… [And] these two kids, in a natural [and deserted] environment, they wouldn’t wear clothes. It wouldn’t be something that was in the forefront of their minds, that they needed to cover up.”
“As time went on, it just became more and more natural not to have clothes on,” Atkins said. “The crew made it very, very easy. Randall [Kleiser], the director, made it very, very easy about it. [The scenes] were absolutely important for the film, but it wasn’t grandiose. It wasn’t something that was there for the exhibition of the film. He really wanted this to be as natural and as real as possible. I understood that and got that.”
“By the time I was done leaving that island four and a half months later, it [was] really hard for me to keep my clothes on at a beach,” he joked.
People magazine noted that critics largely panned the movie. However, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The outlet reported that the movie grossed more than $58 million worldwide, making it the ninth-highest-grossing film of 1980.
Looking back at his Hollywood career, Atkins said he has no regrets.
“I got to a point in my life where I married young,” he said. “I wanted to be a dad more than chase the business… When I was 16, I used to teach sailing in Rye, New York, to little kids. From that measly paycheck that I was getting, I used to put a dollar away for someday when I had kids. That’s how badly I wanted kids. When I had my two kids, I just did whatever came my way to put food on the table for them and keep working.”
“I’ve been blessed,” he said. “I’ve done more than 100 movies and television shows at this point. Now my kids have their kids, and that’s pretty remarkable… I’ve done everything in this business except make my own film. That’s the last box I now want to check off… That’s what I’m chasing right now, putting some really good projects together… So there are no regrets.”
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